Connection
by Amy Raine
Summary: The Chief is going to teach Bolin the way her mother taught her. One sided Bolin/Lin Beifong, mostly a gen fic though.


"You ready?"

Bolin gawked at the Chief, seated behind the wheel of the humble looking Cabbage Corp truck. She wore a simple tunic, a lot like his own except not patched and threadbare, and calf-length pants. Without her police armor she looked…human. Sure, she was always human, but she was also always in cop mode. By shedding the uniform, it was like she had shed that hard facade along with it.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"On a trip. Get in if you're coming, else I'm leaving without you."

Okay, she hadn't shed all of it.

He hauled himself in the passenger side, she put the truck into gear, then they puttered off. The Chief drove like she did everything else, with precision and care, her odometer always exactly at the posted speed limit. Cars began to line up in the lane behind them, honking their horns.

"If I wasn't off duty, I swear…" She stuck her head out the window and shook her fist. "Knock it off, or I'll give you something to honk about!"

Bolin couldn't help his sigh of relief when they turned off the main thoroughfare and onto a road that led beyond the city limits. The high rises of downtown dwindled in the rearview mirror, while in front of them the mountains rose up tall and imposing. As they got further away from Republic City, the smooth pavement of the road gave way to dirt and rocks. The Chief slowed down, but her truck still shook violently at every bump and Bolin thought his teeth might rattle out of his head.

The Chief peered over her steering wheel. "I always miss this turn…oh, here it is." To their left were two tracks, barely visible through the wild tangle of brush lining the road. She pulled onto it and they bounced over the ruts, the truck sputtering and complaining, until she finally gave up and parked.

"We'll have to walk from here," she said, sliding out. "This old heap won't make it up the mountain." Sure enough, the faint tracks did wind through the grass and up the mountain side. Squinting, Bolin thought he could see some kind of building at the top, but from this angle it was blocked by boulders and trees.

On the long hike up neither spoke, mainly because Bolin was huffing and puffing a little too hard to think of anything funny to say. He was in shape, really; but it was a pro-bender kind of fitness, not an endurance climbing kind of fitness. It bothered him that Chief Beifong didn't seem winded in the slightest.

When they got half way up Bolin saw that the tracks turned into a long stairway, cracked and overgrown with weeds, leading to a small building roofed in dark green tile. Some of the tiles had fallen in, leaving a hole, and the gold trim was flaking away, but it still seemed pretty sturdy. They walked underneath the faded gate and up the last flight of stairs to the entrance. What looked like wooden doors was actually carved and painted stone, as the Chief showed when she bent them aside.

The interior was just one large room, plain except for simple windows. Bolin noted that the walls and floor were also stone, underneath a fine layer of dust.

"You know where we are?"

"Not a clue," he answered.

"S'all right. I wouldn't expect you to know." The Chief looked around with an unreadable expression. "This is my mother's old school. The Beifong Metalbending Academy. Closed down when old Yu Dao was rechristened Republic City and she started up the police force."

"Wow," Bolin said, meaning it. To think this was where a young Toph Beifong once stood. He wondered if she would have liked him at all, or just thought of him as a wimp.

"She kept saying she'd sell it," the Chief said in an odd, faraway voice, "but never did, so I ended up with it. I should either fix it up or just knock the place down and let nature take over, but…I dunno."

He almost reached out to touch her arm, but stopped himself. "Do you miss her?"

She chuckled once, a dry, bittersweet sound. "It's complicated, kid, and I'm not gonna talk about it with a rookie. Come on."

At the word 'rookie,' Bolin felt warmth fill him and stain his cheeks. She'd only call him that if she considered him one of the team.

The Chief led the way back outside and around the school to the back, where they came upon a sheer cliff face. She made a sharp motion with her arm and a slab of rock slid aside to reveal what appeared to be an old mine shaft.

"This is why she picked this place. The old colonists mined out most of the ore to make Fire Nation navy ships, but there was just enough left to practice metalbending on."

"So I'm gonna be working with ore?"

The Chief barked out a laugh. "One step at a time, kid."

She walked down the shaft, disappearing into the darkness below. Bolin realized they hadn't brought any kind of lamp, lantern or even a freaking torch with them. Yeah, he was an earthbender, but being surrounded by several tons of it, just one snapped wooden beam away from crushing him like an ant, was not comforting. He was not going to lose his cool in front of the Chief, though. Lifting his chin, he marched after her.

As he went on, the light streaming in behind him dwindled until it was gone. His eyes tried to adjust, but even night vision requires some light and there was none. The darkness rendered him totally blind. His breath became quick and shallow, his heart sped up, he was this close to turning around and making a break for the air outside…

"Bolin."

The Chief's voice came from somewhere to his left, and instinct made him fumble in her direction. A strong hand gripped his wrist. "Calm down. You really are blind, aren't you? No one ever taught you how to use the earth to see?"

"Uh…"

"Right. Looks like I have a lot of work to do." Her other hand came up and rested on his shoulder, and his panic lessened. "Okay, get down on your hands and knees."

Bolin couldn't help himself. Blame it on nerves. "Come on, Chief, you're not even going to take me to dinner first?"

A sound between a scoff and a snort came from where he thought she was. "Cut the garbage. Last thing I need is rampaging teenage hormones." The words carried a note of affection, though, and he smiled as he knelt down, then placed his hands on the stone.

He heard some rustling of cloth, felt the brush of a hand next to his own, and this time his heart was not beating faster from fear. "Now, 'see' the rock."

"See it?"

"Yeah. Reach out with your earthbending and try to 'see' it. You're not going to get color, but you'll get other things; size, shape, density, texture. Use your bending to look around and tell me what you find."

Bolin reached out with his earthbending, like she told him to. Immediately he was aware of all that rock, all around him, for leagues and leagues. It was like someone blew a trumpet in his ear, shone a white light in his eyes and zapped him with one of those horrible Equalist taser things all at the same time. Bile rose in his throat; he coughed and prayed to whatever spirits were listening that he wouldn't retch like he did at the semi-finals after eating all those noodles.

"You okay?"

"Fine," he rasped.

"Too much?"

"A little."

"That's good, though."

"Good?" He coughed again, still contending with the nausea. "How?"

"That much sensitivity to your element, you could do some pretty amazing things. A lot of earthbenders, especially city benders, just don't have that sensitivity. Sure, they can push some disks around and dance around all fancy but they never get what earthbending is. The metalbenders on my squad are good, but they're almost too good. They focus so much on whipping those cables around, sometimes they forget to connect with the ground from time to time, to remember where they come from and who they are."

"But you do?"

"I try to," she said, and there's a catch in her voice that wasn't there before. "I try not to forget."

He heard her breathe deep, and when she spoke again she was back to the same old Chief. "Now, do it again, but ease into it."

So Bolin did. The cacophony hit him once again, but he braced himself in his mind—physically too, digging his fingers into the rock under him—and bore the weight of it, drawing on all his strength, all his chi, everything inside.

The din didn't diminish, but it became less insistent, more manageable. The earth vibrated, not just from creatures moving above but from below, like a pulse, like it was alive. As those vibrations traveled through the stone he could tell how they changed, marking different kinds of rock; some layered and relatively brittle, some uniform and dense, some a weird sluggish mishmash of the two. He also noticed blank spots that his sense circled around—the remaining veins of iron, he guessed. If he pushed further he could feel the structure of the old school on the outside of the mountain, 'see' the hole in the roof and the cracks in the walls.

"I see the school," he said. "I see…a rabbiroo, hopping across the courtyard in back. I see the roots of a tree above me, squeezing in between the cracks. And below me, a little to the right, there's an iron vein the size of my forearm someone missed."

"Nice work, rookie." Was he imagining things, or did the Chief sound impressed? "Okay, pull back. We're gonna head back outside."

"That's it?"

"Yeah, kid. Don't wanna overwork you and end up with you in bed for a week. Come on."

Emerging from the mine, he ducked his head and shielded his gaze against the sudden, painful light. He stumbled after the Chief to the shade cast by the roof overhang and sat down next to her on a little bench. Out of direct sunlight he blinked and rubbed at his watery eyes.

"So, Chief, when am I going to start real metalbending?"

She studied him for a bit; her eyes were paler than his, more like jade than like emerald. He liked her eyes, the soft lines that crinkled around them during one of her rare smiles. He liked the thin scars on her right cheek that made her look fierce and powerful and added mystery to her. He even liked her graying hair. It just made her look elegant.

He was hopeless, he really was.

She stood up and started scanning the ground. Several seconds passed before she gave a little "aha" and bent down to pick something up. Then she removed a dagger from her waistband and brought both items over to him. "Take them."

The something turned out to be a clump of iron, not in raw ore form but not in any recognizable shape, and rusting in patches. "Notice anything different between the two?" the Chief asked.

"Yeah. One's a dagger."

"No, smartmouth. A difference in the metal."

Bolin hefted the two objects, one in each hand, running his thumbs over them. "The iron blob, it's got bits of earth in it. Really tiny bits."

"That's right. The steel cables we use are actually poor quality with lots of impurities. Couldn't build a car with that stuff, but we can bend it with no problem once we learn how, by finding those impurities and manipulating them."

"So we can't bend cars?" So much for his fantasies of crumpling cars with his bare hands.

"Well, a really sensitive earthbender could. Getting rid of all impurities is almost impossible for most metals. The only metals I haven't been able to bend are the really refined and purified types of gold and silver. I could find enough earth in that dagger to bend it, but I don't want to wreck it. It's a Piandao and they're hard to come by."

Awed, he handed the dagger back, then focused on the iron chunk, turning it over and over in his hands. Finally he pressed on it…and grinned to see his thumbprint left behind. "Look!"

The Chief took it from him and inspected it. "Showoff." She tossed it back, and he caught it easily with one hand. "Keep it, play with it, see what else you can do. Next time we meet, we'll try something bigger."

Bolin tried to sound casual. "So…there's gonna be a next time."

"Sure, kid. Potential like yours, you gotta be trained by the best." She stretched, then eyed him. "But don't get any wise ideas, okay? I'm old enough to be your grandmother."

Cheeks burning, Bolin stuck his hands in his pockets and followed her back down to the truck. Inside one pocket he kept a tight grip on the iron, like it was gold.


End file.
